Taliban Deny Leader is Dead

The Washington Post reports:

Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency said Monday it is investigating reports that Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and some of his top commanders have left their hideout near the Afghan-Pakistan border and cannot be located.

The reports led some Afghan media outlets to say that Omar might have been killed. But the Taliban staunchly denied that in a statement issued Monday.

“Claims and rumors were spread this morning by the Kabul stooge regime’s intelligence directorate, other officials and some media outlets that the esteemed Amir ul-Mumineen was martyred in Pakistan, ” the Taliban statement about Omar said. “We strongly reject these false claims of the enemy.” The statement referred to Omar by a high Islamic title that translates as “commander of the faithful.”

A spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence bureau, Lutfullah Mashal, told reporters in Kabul that he “cannot confirm officially whether [Omar] is dead or alive.”

Mashal quoted unidentified “sources” on the Pakistani side of the border as saying Omar “disappeared from his location in the last four or five days.” He said Omar has been living in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, for 10 years.

“Our sources and senior Taliban commanders have confirmed that they have not been able to contact Mullah Omar,” Mashal said. “So far, we cannot confirm the death or killing of Mullah Omar officially, but we can confirm that he has ... disappeared from his hideout in Quetta of Baluchistan.” Quetta, a city of about 900,000 people, lies 124 miles southeast of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Afghan Taliban and long a stronghold of the Islamist radical movement in southern Afghanistan.

Omar, who is believed to be in his early 50s, was born into an impoverished Pashtun family near Kandahar and joined the fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. He lost an eye in battle from a shrapnel wound sometime in the 1980s and began studying and teaching in Islamic seminaries, or madrassahs, in Pakistan. It was during this period when he reportedly met Osama bin Laden, who went on to found the al-Qaeda terrorist network.